LinkedIn Is Selling Your Data Too. Here’s What to Turn Off.
28 Jun 2026 · 3 min read · Comments
LinkedIn presents itself as a professional network. Behind the scenes it runs one of the largest B2B data operations in the world — and a significant portion of your profile is being sold to people and companies you've never heard of.
What LinkedIn Collects
LinkedIn collects far more than your job title. From its own privacy policy, the data collected includes:
- Your precise location (if you use the mobile app)
- Every profile you view and every post you dwell on
- Your phone's contact list if you grant access
- Device identifiers, IP address, and browser fingerprint
- Inferences about your salary, seniority, and company size
How LinkedIn Sells This Data
LinkedIn's primary monetisation is its Marketing Solutions platform, which lets advertisers target users by job title, company, industry, seniority, skills, and groups. Advertisers can also use LinkedIn's Matched Audiences to upload a customer list and find LinkedIn profiles that match. Your profile data, engagement patterns, and inferred attributes are the product they're buying.
LinkedIn was also at the centre of a major 2021 data scraping incident where 700 million user profiles — including names, phone numbers, email addresses, and location data — were scraped and sold on hacker forums. LinkedIn called it "scraping" rather than a breach, which legally reduced their liability, but the data was real and it was sold.
Settings to Change Right Now
Go to Settings & Privacy → Data Privacy. Change these:
- Manage your data and activity → turn off Data for Research and Surveys and Data for Third-Party Applications
- Advertising data → turn off Profile data for advertising, Interest-based ads, and Audience insights for advertising campaigns
- Visibility → Profile visibility off LinkedIn → set to No to stop your profile appearing in Google search results
- Communications → Targeted advertising → opt out of third-party ad networks
Your LinkedIn Data Is Already on Data Broker Sites
The scraping incident from 2021 means your name, job history, location, and often your email address are sitting in data broker databases right now — regardless of what you change on LinkedIn. Data brokers buy and resell this information to anyone willing to pay for it: marketers, recruiters, people-search sites, and in some cases scammers.
LinkedIn's settings reduce future collection. They don't remove data that's already been shared, sold, or scraped. For that, the only practical approach is to systematically contact the brokers who hold it — which is what automated removal services do on your behalf.
